Re: Trump II

[JoeKitchen]

Even companies as Google and Apple; innovators as they are-  know nothing to do with their immense capital.
Meaning they rather have it at the bank, instead of investing it in the real economy.
In the 1950’s Roosevelt put money in the real economy making the USA flourish. All citizens were helped with this investment.


Now, the real economy suffers, especially the poor real economy.
I think those people - left behind - have voted for Trump and they are right to be angry, but i don’t think Trump will change this financial system for the benefit of those people that voted for him. His current actions seems to indicate he will make it easier for the financial market to create new bubbles.

Obama had the right timing with the crisis to make a change, but he failed to do so. I think Bernie Sanders might have been the best president now that could make this necessary change happen.

Come on now, banks don't just hoard money and keep it locked in their vaults.  They lend it, or at least that is what they want to do.  If not, they don't make any money.   

The financial crisis was caused by too much lending and in true American fashion, we totally over reacted after the crash making it harder to get a loan.  Now small businesses who want to expand cant get the capital to do so because of too many regulations, Dodd-Frank being the largest.  On top of that, the shear amount of new regulations put into effect make it impossible for any bank without a large staff to follow law and the lending requirements make it harder for them to make money.

You think it is just by happenstance that we have had a net negative growth in the banking sector along with large increases in overall banking fees?

This is the real problem, the life blood of growing the economy is being held back.  Not only does this indirectly prevent businesses from growing, but since banks also create money, it is keeping the economy from growing as well. 

And the financial center is not some abstract separate economy.  If allowed to operate correctly, our economy should be booming.  Yes, one can make an argument that, aside from the IPOs, trading stocks really does no one any good but the investors, investors such as every single person who has a retirement fund in almost the entire world. 

The problem is socialism does not work, and Obama really force fed it to us.  Clinton would have continued it, maybe less so, but Sanders would have made it worse. 

It's interesting how many people are for socialism but fail to look at the countries (who don't receive massive amounts of aid such as those in the Eastern block whom the USA protects from Russia) where it is actually implemented.  I totally understand the altruistic concept of helping everyone out and creating a big safety net, but in every country socialism is applied, that country eventually collapses. 

I was in Cuba recently and the government in 2013 was forced to make it legal for private citizens to open their own restaurants (due to an extremely weak economy).  What a novel concept! 

Turns out the private restaurants are booming and making money hand over fist.  As a matter of fact, some with medical degrees are choosing to serve tables instead of practice medicine because they can make more money.  This is one of the most bazaar things I heard while there, but if you think about it, it kind of makes sense.  Medicine on the island is controled by the government and is a socialist economy, whereas the paladars are pure capitalism. 

[JoeKitchen]

Actually that is not true.  The National Federation of Independent Business, the trade group that represents small firms regularly surveys their membership and access to capital is never a bit issue for them.
I don't understand this statement.  I own stock in several big money center banks and their growth since the recovery from the great recession has been just fine according to my brokerage account (as well as their financial filings).
  Economy has done better than all other countries save 'maybe' China since 2008.  Sure we would all like 4% growth per year but I don't think that will ever be in the cards unless we really try to overheat things and then inflation will come roaring back.
 Meaning?  I've been investing in stocks ever since I was a teenager (a long time ago!) and find that the stock market is pretty reflective of the overall economy.
Please describe in detail all or at least some of the socialistic things that Obama force fed us.  Don't tell me it was the Affordable Care Act either as that was something that the Heritage Foundation came up with (I have the original work paper from them in my files as well as a Wall Street Journal op-ed on the topic).  Private sector delivery of health care cannot in any way be described as socialistic.
  It depends on what you are defining as socialism.  certainly the Scandinavian countries provide a lot of free social welfare for their citizens and they seem to be reasonably stable.  The Netherlands might also fall into this category but they do rely on mandatory private health insurance to care for all citizens.
Cuba was and still is a dictatorship and I don't think you can confuse that with democratic socialism

On the first point, I happen to disagree. 

Second point, I am not talking about the overall financial growth of the banking sector, but the overall number of new banks created.  The banking sector is contracting to fewer banks overall even though the amount of business may be going up.  This is the first time on the history of the country for there to be negative growth in amount of banks for an extended period of time. 

Third, just because the economy has been growing does not mean it is doing good, or nearly as good as it could have been.  The was a great article on CNN rating Obama's presidency, and one of the commentators made great points about how his economic success is severally lacking and if you look below the surface, past the overall job numbers, the date is pretty lack luster.  The rate of growth has been hampered by regulations.  I realize you are a big government guy and don't see anything wrong with regulations, however on the ground, they hinder growth. 

My clients (I work mainly with architects) see it all the time.  Projects are killed due to too many regulations that often are pointless.  Recently, there was a regulation that was initially passed but recanted (amazing) that all new single family homes needed sprinter systems.  I could see multi-family complexes, but installing sprinklers in every home would be crazy expensive.  This is just one example. 

Obama certainly would have took us to a more socialist state if he could have, and I think the projection was in the that direction.  Look at all of the regulations. 

Insofar as the investor comment, that was to show that the stock market and such is not some separate piece of the economy that only benefits a few.  Many people have this idea that no one but those directly working in stocks benefit from that sector.  I was just showing this is not the case and sited an example of how the stock market helps nearly everyone, such as in retirement savings. 

Scandinavia and the Netherland ... I have to get back to you with my thoughts here. 

Cuba may be a dictatorship, but that has nothing to do with how the economy is or is not controlled.  A country can be communist or socialist and still be a dictatorship. 

[KLaban]

...Even more annoying: I watched Sky News' financial spot last night and they floated a graph indicating that today's pensioners are so much more wealthy than the younger people in their late twenties; it was claimed that the average pensioner earns about £24,000 a year. I just received a note from the Pensions agency telling me that from mid-April, my state pension will rise to £123.99 (note the generosity in the 0.99!) a week, which last time I wound up the calculator, made a yearly sum of £6447.48...

That £24,000 would of course include a working lifetime of contributions to occupational pensions for those in employment and a working lifetime of contributions to personal pensions for the self employed.

[KLaban]

It is important to distinguish between nominal interest rates (that all seem to remember and compare) from real interest rates, i.e., nominal minus inflation. In other words, interest rates could have been in the double digits, but inflation was just as well. Both are low today.

But looks like Rob is right: in the eighties, the real rates were quite positive:

Yes, they were fantastic, I remember them well, but as Alan has suggested you can't rely on interest rates over a period of decades to provide constant levels of income. Broadly speaking pensions won, property won, savings lost.

Over to the statisticians...

[Manoli]

If religion is important for you, then the best solution is to live in a country which supports your particular flavour of religion. That's pragmatic.

So what's Britain to do, then ?
Substantial Muslim population, ethnically diverse and none of this will be 'rebalanced' with Brexit ...

[Christopher Sanderson]

Moderator's Note: This comment and accompanying pictures were not consistent with our guidelines and have been removed.

[pegelli]

How many people have you employed?  How much in salaries do you pay out every year?

So you think you can only criticize other people if you've done the same or better.
I don't think so, it's just a feeble try to salvage your position, but in my mind it only undermines it further.

[Slobodan Blagojevic]

... On the other hand liberals tend to get their news from multiple sources and tend to trust multiple sources of news....

Sorry, I couldn't find a patting-yourself-on-the-back gif... this would do, I hope.

[Chris Kern]

As someone who once was guilty of committing journalism, let me add that (at least for those of us in the United States; I don't have sufficient experience with news media in other countries to generalize) it's important to distinguish between the way the traditional print press covers Trump and the way the all-news cable TV channels do.  With a few notable exceptions at the extremes of the political spectrum, almost all of the former have a review process in which editors try to remove any obvious bias from straight news reporting before a piece is published.  In some cases—the New York Times is a notable example—there typically will be multiple levels of editing before a story about government or politics makes it into print.  The need to feed online news sites has truncated this editorial process to some extent by tightening deadline cycles, but even there the requirement for a review by an editor mostly remains intact.

All-news cable TV is a very different kind of medium.  First, the reporter often speaks directly and extemporaneously to the audience, in real-time; other than a quick chat with a director in a central studio, there is no opportunity to review what the reporter is about to say, and no doubt afterwards many of them cringe at the way their words came out.  Even when a report is contained in a video that is produced prior to airtime, the editorial review, such as it is, typically consists of nothing more than a hurried edit by a field producer (basically another reporter who doesn't appear on camera), and these days, given budget constraints that limit the size of television crews, often not even that.  Second, cable TV outlets in this country mostly fill their airtime with commentary by either their own staff members or guests—sometimes paid consultants, sometimes public figures who want the exposure—who are selected to represent particular points-of-view.  These news media function more like the opinion pages of a newspaper than the news columns.

Trump presents a novel problem for everybody in the news business.  He often says things that are probably or demonstrably untrue.  It isn't always clear what his motives are.  Sometimes he appears to be repeating what "somebody" told him.  Sometimes he seems to be conjuring up an example to fit his narrative.  Sometimes he apparently doesn't have any information on a particular subject and blurts out the first random thought that pops into his head.  Occasionally, it sounds as though he is delusional.  And probably sometimes he is lying.  If you're a conscientious reporter, the only easy case is when he says something that might be true but for which he offers no evidence; then you can simply write or say that.  When what he says is obviously false, you're faced with a difficult decision about how to characterize it.  That's where it's very useful to have a second (or third, etc.) pair of eyes and—preferably—enough time prior to deadline to make a considered decision.

[Bart_van_der_Wolf]

Presidents have been complaining about news' bias  for years.  Obama complained that Fox news made him look bad.   I guess he was happy the way CNN, MSNBD, ABC, CBS, NBC and all the other (liberal) stations treated him, the opposite with Trump. Liberals and Democrats once tried to use the FCC under Obama to shut down Fox and take their license to broadcast away, saying they were biased.  It appears freedom of the press only applies to Liberal media.

Sources, even fake ones?

Cheers,
Bart

[KLaban]

Donald Trump spotted in Manchester UK

[KLaban]

Speaking about health issues, this election indeed produced adverse effects for at least half the population: shock, derangement, anger, anxiety, uncontrollable sobbing, clinical depression, etc. I think the next elections should come with a Surgeon General warning 

And that's just the Trump supporters!

Boom boom.

[Bart_van_der_Wolf]

And 15 minutes ago (Former U.S. intelligence chief rejects Trump wiretap accusation):
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-idUSKBN16C0MG

Cheers,
Bart

[LesPalenik]

Out of curiosity, how would you rewrite that to be "accurate?"

As reported and worded by Spiegel:

Der 36 Jahre alte Mann aus dem Kosovo hatte am Vorabend neun Menschen mit einer Axt verletzt, vier von ihnen schwer. Unter den Verletzten sind auch ein 13-jähriges Mädchen aus Düsseldorf und zwei italienische Touristinnen.

The 36-year-old man from Kosovo had injured nine people with an ax in the evening, four of them seriously. Among the injured are also a 13-year-old girl from Düsseldorf and two Italian tourists.

[paulgrundy]

 They don't integrate and become real citizens.   I'm not saying America doesn't have problems.  But I feel we deal with it better because of our immigrant past and present.  Immigrants want to become part of the American dream as America is not only a country.  It's a state of mind.

Can this be the same America that until the mid 1960's legally practised racial segregation including sending black women to prison for marrying white men??
Kettle Pot Black.

[tom b]

It is a small world. So glad you were friends. I lost track of Steve. He remarried.  The whole thing was a nightmare.   Something no family should have to go through. Alan.

Yep, one million dead in Iraq, something no family should have to go through, something to think about.

To be honest, left and right fight in America, the consequences is that millions suffer as a result.

It seems to be a vacuum, ideology versus results, oh yeah a lot of people died but my party won.

Grrrr,

[tom b]

What makes Jihadism continue, one million deaths in Iraq.

Three thousand deaths in America, was a maelstrom, imagine what America's response has created in the Islamic world.

Food for thought,

[Allen Bourgeois]

I think you're right; I also think that we should get rid of state subsidies to artists. I see grants as a very doubtful strategy.

By all means fund art schools, but then let that education be the limit of the state's intervention. I see no reason at all why individuals should be funded through the public coffers once they have had their training. Subsidies simply create unnatural prices and extend the misery or, alternatively, the publicly-funded pleasures of ego-trippers riding a horse they never personally learned to break in to their requirements: a horse called Business. If you believe yourself an artist, great, just don't imagine that the rest of society might owe you for that.

I think public museums and galleries should get good funding in order to keep and also to buy great work, but not so the folks who want to get their stuff hanging inside them. Ditto dancers: because you want to leap around showing the size of your upholstered cluster is fine, just as long as you do it on your own dollar, pound, euro or whatever; I'm sure lots of rubles are still headed that way - so there's an idea.

Why would one think it moral to draw the line at artists? Why not pay weekend fishermen and hang-gliders for having their versions of fun, too? It's unreasonable to limit public funds to one section of self-entertainment but not to all others.

;-)

Rob C

I don't know about that Rob. Look at countries that do help fund and protect the arts. Also look at the work done during the dust bowl and the great depression by the FSA and also some of the great art that came out of that period with the government putting all of those artists to work. It was an amazing time for the visual arts in this country.

Heres my take on all of this.

[JoeKitchen]

There are situations where the commercial sector is well-placed to provide goods and services and some for which it is not. That's about all you can say on the subject. Painting the discussion black or white is self-evidently silly, why do we continue to do so?

There are many instances of market failure where guvmint intrusion seems to be the only way forward. Do you think the "free market" would have eliminated slavery in the 19th century or "Jim Crow" in the 20th? What do you think high import tariffs to protect certain industries are if not guvmint intrusion in a "free" market?

Do you think that the "free market" is aided by allowing large corporations to become near-monopolies? It's not who owns the company that makes it efficient (whatever efficient means), it's whether or not there is competition. We seem to have forgotten that in our headlong rush to make a small percentage of people really rich, in the hopes that they will turn around and bless the rest of us with some jobs.

Do people really think that it's not important to insure that the water and air remain non-toxic? Do you really think that industry will voluntarily see to that, despite centuries of evidence that no one individual gives a crap about the "commons" unless penalties and supervision are in place to make sure of it?

NPR is an arm of the guvmint? That's hysterical. Worldwide, the ONLY media outlets that have any validity anymore are the ones that have some measure of autonomy guaranteed by mandate. Nearly all the private media is a farce.

I find it hilarious when people quote some obscure paragraph from Adam Smith that suits their immediate debating points, as if Mr. Smith was the last word on the subject, but at the same time choose to ignore his own words and those of many others on the importance of a healthy guvmint sector.

I also find it amusing that some people seem to think that the "swamp" only exists in Washington D.C. Do you not think there are swamps in every state capital, in every head office of every corporation, in every military base, in every guvmint-funded "security" establishment? I also find it amusing that people religiously think that Trump isn't part of that swamp and that he will change it. If that isn't irrational religious belief, I don't know what is.

First, I would have more respect for this post if you did not go out of your way to misspell government.  Typically, doing so is a clear insult to the right from those on the left whenever a lefty uses "guvmint" or, even worse, "Merica." 

However, I digress. 

The role of government is to protect its citizens.  The repeal of slavery and Jim Crow laws has nothing to do with economics or capitalism; it has everything to do with protection.  The civil right movement was about giving all an equal chance.  Not to mention, the free market party, the Republicans, were the ones who spear headed the civil right movement while still being for free markets. 

Third, if you study economics you would see that markets that are more heavily regulated tend to shrink and contract, and the cost of entry goes up.  Markets that are less regulated tend to have more players in the field and are less costly to enter.  (Cost of entry is a relative term, so lets not say well, you cant just open an auto company because it would be too expensive.  That would be an uneducated remark, not to mention that is why we have investment banks.) 

Sure, there are some exceptions, however for the most part, more regulated, less competition; less regulated, more competition. 

Forth, the reason a small percentage of people are really rich has nothing to do with monopolies.  It has to do with the fact that successful companies using the Internet can sell to a much larger geography.  Additionally, modern technologies increase logistically efficient and shipping cost have gone down.  This increases revenues and give those at the top more bargaining power for higher salaries. 

Last, if a private company has a swamp, then it will fail, and only the investors will loose money.  If government has a swamp, it will fail, but usually no one gets fired, and then they ask for money, usually get it, and we are all left on the hook for the mistakes. 

[Manoli]

*deleted